Saturday, February 22, 2014

1. Close to home on this one - Ryan Langrill further develops the point made in the last post about travel across state borders in response to the minimum wage. BTW, this sort of accounting is super-duper due diligence. I think it's important to be above reproach in empirical work, but it's worth noting that. This applies to basically any policy that you're using state level variation for... and its effect is so ambiguous and likely small that pretty much no one addresses it. The minimum wage debate is fierce, though, so it's probably worth addressing if we can, if for no other reason than to rule it out so in the future we can feel better about not worrying about addressing it.

2. David Henderson shares some neat work by the CBO to account for publication bias in the minimum wage literature. Here is a good example of this sort of work.

3. Finally, frequent commenter Blue Aurora shared this article with me from the most recent issue of the Economic Journal. It covers some of the worker flow effects (separation and hiring) that have recently been of interest to Bob Murphy (this is also covered in recent work by Dube, btw).

Good links, Daniel. The comments on the Henderson piece are quite good, too--I wouldn't normally assume that you'd need to strongly correct for publication bias in minimum wage studies (because, well, the biggest names in the field have published nonsignificant results), but gwern makes a good point about extremely high positive elasticities being more easily dismissed than high negative elasticities. (also, maybe it's more difficult to publish nonsignificant results if you aren't Card or Krueger!)

By the way, I got an email about this in the mail. Not exactly my cup of tea, but you might be interested in applying: http://www.zew.de/event1926